Therefore you now have sorrow; but I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you.

John 16:22

I left off telling of the dream I had after crying out to God to show me He was with me. It’s interesting how even if we’re inundated with tokens of God’s love and His presence throughout our lives, a period of trial can completely derail our faith if our eyes are on the problem and not on our God. A favorite evangelist, Doug Batchelor, said it this way: “You can have 50 years of miracles and in 5 minutes of listening to the devil you’ll forget them all.”  God had been showing us token after token of His love for us all along, even before this dream, through the tiniest things happening, and in one night I was given up to despair and doubting His active presence just because of one setback. Nothing like a reality check on your own faithfulness. I’ll give you a few examples:

One night, when we were almost home after transferring her to Loyola Medical Center, I looked up out the car window at the perfect time to see a meteor streak across the sky. If I had looked up a moment before or a moment after I would have missed it– but God knew the exact second I’d look up and told that meteor where to be right at that time. 

The night before mom’s first stent was placed, the rest of us were sitting around the table at home eating dinner, not knowing what would come the next day. We were worried. It wasn’t a procedure that carried no risks, and we didn’t even know for sure that it’d work. We prayed as a family over the dinner, and we prayed over mom. And at that point we looked outside, and the entire sky was illuminated with flaming pink clouds. It was a sunset that reached clear across the sky in consistent intensity– an unusual phenomenon that others in the area couldn’t miss. It was all over the news and Facebook. The significance? My mom used to watch the sunset with us, and whenever the clouds were rimmed with hot pink, she’d say, “Since I was a little girl, I always thought God painted clouds pink when He was thinking of me.” He was thinking of her– and since she couldn’t see those clouds but we could, that showed us He was thinking of us too. He was showing us our prayers were heard and we had nothing to fear.

As we sat in my mom’s hospital room at Loyola one Sabbath afternoon after her stent procedure, we were talking about how we were going to get food. We were so focused on the procedure that we had forgotten to bring food with us for the day. Now, it was Sabbath, and we were downtown Chicago without a way to get food outside of spending money. (For those unfamiliar with the Bible Sabbath, it’s a day God set aside for us to spend together with Him. We don’t do any work, and we don’t allow anyone to work for us, we don’t buy or sell– we just use that day to rely on God to meet our needs and enjoy the day in peace and rest with Him. For more information, click here ) There were five of us in that room (including mom, whose hospital meal was already set to be delivered to her). Right at that moment, as we were sitting there with our stomachs rumbling, not sure how we were going to get to eat, a cafeteria worker peeked her head in the room and asked, “Hey, are any of you guys hungry? This never happens, but we just had four people get discharged from this unit at the same time, and the cafeteria had already made all their trays…they’re just going to be thrown out if you don’t want them.”

All of our jaws hit the ground at the same time.

God takes care of His people.

The day after my dream, my mom was transferred to yet another transplant facility– Northwestern Medical Center. They emergently placed a rare second stent which caused the first one to work also, so she was getting double the life-saving effect. Northwestern evaluated her and put her on their transplant list. But one year later, they too decided she was too complicated and again, kicked her off the list. With no other place to go, she asked if she could be seen by Mayo Clinic. It was her last resort. There were huge roadblocks which were all moved out of the way in time for her to get evaluated in September and tentatively approved for their list if she came back later and needed to be listed. 

In November of 2016, mom hit the milestone we were all dreading. She went into liver failure. As a result of trying to pick up the slack from the liver, her kidneys failed also. The doctors said “we’ve got to get you to a transplant center TODAY.” But there was one problem— her insurance had only authorized for her to get evaluated at Mayo, not treated. Mayo Clinic was the only transplant center that had said they’d list her, and her insurance said “no.” After a hysterical call from me to my mom’s case worker, sobbing while repeating what the case worker already knew– “she WILL die if she doesn’t get to Mayo for a transplant”– miraculously she was approved and transferred to Mayo, and driven the 5 hours to Minnesota via ambulance by paramedics who had VOLUNTEERED to drive the 10-hour round trip through the sleet in the middle of the night. They had been told by their supervisors that they weren’t required to, but they did it anyway.

We found out later what had happened behind the scenes—the case worker had personally spoken with the director of the insurance company and said “who do you think you are, keeping this woman from the ONE transplant center that can save her life? She will die if she doesn’t get to Mayo Clinic and you are preventing her from getting there.” We are forever indebted to that woman for her courage and how she allowed herself to be used by God!

The doctors activated her on their list on November 21, 2016. They released her from the hospital a few days later, on Thanksgiving, because there was nothing they could do for her except wait for the call for a liver– which sometimes takes months to years. However, her MELD score (the ranking of how sick you are as a transplant patient and who needs a liver first, ranging from 15-40) was 35. Once you hit a “record high” for yourself as far as that number goes, you get to keep it for one week even if you get a little better. She was going to have this score until midnight Monday morning. In that week her kidneys healed and she was able to walk and her overall health improved; she still desperately needed a transplant and would not last long without one, but now she was relatively “healthy” enough to have pretty good odds of surviving the surgery. So we had to stay in a hotel near the hospital, with her in full blown liver failure and tied to an oxygen tank, until that score timed out. 

That weekend, my sister Heather, my grandma and I went home to Chicago because Heather had to be back to school on Monday to take her finals if there wasn’t going to be a transplant. On Sunday, we were supposed to take out opposite directions: Heather to Michigan for school, and myself back to Minnesota to pick up our parents. As usual, we were about an hour late in leaving the house. Right as we were about to actually leave, we got a call on the land line from the surgeon saying they had a potential liver and they were going to go pick it up—get mom to the hospital ASAP. 

I’d like to stop here to point out a couple things.

#1, this was less than 24 hours before her MELD score would time out and she would have be sent to the bottom of the list to wait–and possibly die there waiting, like 8,000 other people every year who die waiting on organs. 

#2, they called our home phone. In Illinois. It was the only number they had to call and we just happened to be there instead of in Minnesota where the rest of the family was. 

If we had missed that call, the liver would have gone to someone else. 

God sent us on a 5 hour drive to Chicago and made us an hour late– to pick up the phone.

We were out of our minds with excitement. Half sobbing, half laughing. We probably looked insane.

Mom and dad called a taxi to get to the hospital from the hotel while Heather, grandma, and I hopped back in the car and fought traffic and weather to get back to the hospital in time for the word on whether or not the liver was a match. It was. My mom went into surgery at 11:30 pm on November 27th–half an hour before her MELD score would have timed out. They did a gastric sleeve procedure at the same time as the transplant. It was her weight that had made her such a high risk surgical candidate, but she couldn’t lose weight because of her liver disease. Her liver just wasn’t processing fat or fluid like it was supposed to, so she kept gaining weight. She needed a stomach procedure to make a transplant work– but she couldn’t have one before the transplant because she was too sick, and she couldn’t get one after because it would be too much of an infection risk. So Mayo Clinic had two surgeons in the OR and did both procedures at once.

We found out later that NO other hospital in the US at the time performed that dual procedure. She was the 23rd patient to ever get it done, and everything went perfectly. That means that Mayo Clinic was the only hospital in the United States who would have ever actually given her a liver, and we didn’t even know until after it was over. But God knew. 

My mom lost 130 lbs after the surgery. She is able to drive, which she hasn’t been able to do since 2011. Her disease is gone forever. Her mind is sharp and will never be toxic again. She is totally independent and has a new life now. She even cooks now, which is a talent we joke about being passed down from the DNA of her new liver. There is so much more I could tell you but this is all the detail I think the internet can handle for now.

Nov 2009 (diagnosis date)-Nov 2016 (transplant date): 7 years.

11/21/2016 (transplant list activation date)-11/28/2016 (transplant date): 7 days.

From the first day we stepped into the hospital when she went into liver failure, to the first day we stepped back in our house after the transplant: exactly 40 days.

We had our wilderness experience and God led us through. His handprint is all over it.

Let it always be known that my God is good, the God of miracles, and the God of defeating the odds. We will praise His name forever. ☸